Thrifty Thursday | Shopping around

 

We have to try to get our 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day and I find Lidl and Aldi are the cheapest. The apples in the picture actually came off one of my trees, even cheaper! If you have children put the fruit in a nice bowl to tempt them!

I went to Lidl on Sunday and I hoped to get the chicken legs at £1.89 a kilo, but they must have sold out. I had to pay £2.65 a kilo but still a reasonable price. I like the legs better than the drumsticks because if I cut them in half I have just enough chicken for one meal. I don’t eat as much as I used to and 8 portions of chicken for £2.65 is good. I also picked up potatoes £1.12 for 2.5 Kg, carrots 29p/kg, bananas 52p/kg and white cabbage 69p/kg. One good bargain was a tin of new potatoes for 20p. I like a few of those on a salad. A salad with a few new potatoes is good if you’re trying to lose weight. I did a salad with the fresh prawn from Lidl, a small tub for 65p; you can read about that in my gourmet blog.

I also found Branston pickle, the smooth squeezy one for £1.47 and Heinz salad cream for £1.79; they are getting expensive now. I bought some pickles from Aldi for Christmas and I have put the salad cream away for my Christmas buffet too. I also got my Christmas cards for 99p! You can’t get everything in LIdl and I couldn’t find tins of salmon or sardines. I did get kitchen roll for £1.49  (2 rolls) and find all paper products are expensive now. Avoid the tissues in Lidl, they are too thin, the Asda ones are better value. I rarely use the kitchen roll but always wipe the top of squeezy bottles like the Branston and Heinz salad cream and store upright or they get messy. You should keep the salad cream in the fridge too.

Incidentally, I made soup with the carrots and white cabbage again. It seemed too sweet again, that’s the fructose in the carrots. I added a drop of dry cider and the acidity made it less sweet. I don’t have much sugar so I suppose I taste it more. The dry cider is £1.95 for 2 litres in Lidl!

You can ‘window shop’ online now, it saves precious petrol. I looked at clothes this week and found a nice sweater at Peacocks but need to go to the shop and see it. The last one I had is acrylic and I think I prefer natural fibre like cotton. I’ll shop around online until I find what I want. I managed to get 4 pairs of George jeans from Asda (Wal-Mart) once for £10; I’m still wearing them! They do have some sweaters at Tesco Direct for £5 but I’m not that keen on Tesco. There isn’t much detail, they don’t tell you what the fibre is.  They do tell you on the Asda site, but the one I liked was acrylic. The only plain cotton sweater I can find is at Matalan.  I had nice T shirts from there for £4.00 so I might go and take another look around.

I have my car booked in for it’s MOT, it will pass without much trouble. A small local garage checks it over and takes it for the MOT. They will pick it up in the morning and return it in the afternoon; all done. It pays to find a small independent garage that you can trust. The good news on the motoring front is petrol prices have dropped where I live. It’s down to 128.9p from 130.9 at Morrison’s.

There are bargains to be had everywhere because we are in a recession, so shop around. It appears that there are even bargains to be had on the stock market. If you are a regular reader you’ll know I have bought shares in a couple of companies in the past few weeks. I could have sold them at a slight profit and of course traders buy low and then sell when the price goes up marginally; this is speculation. I am in favour of a new ‘transaction tax’ on all financial transactions because this would limit speculation to some extent. I think we already have one on shares in the form of the stamp duty, but traders circumvent that buy ‘borrowing’ shares and all kinds of different devices to avoid tax and costs. Some believe that buy now at the bottom of the market will make some people very rich and others even richer. It seems even Warren Buffet has been buying shares while they are at bargain prices. Whatever you invest in, whether it’s stocking up your food cupboard or freezer with cheap stuff from Lidl or buying shares on the cheap; you will probably have more financial security in the future. Debts make people financially insecure and bring misery to millions.

You can find more blogs on my Home Page.

 

Related articles

• Gourmet Food | Icelandic Prawn Salad (mike10613.wordpress.com)
• Thrifty Thursday | Every little helps (mike10613.wordpress.com)
• Thrifty Thursday 17 (mike10613.wordpress.com)
• Thrifty Thursday 18 (mike10613.wordpress.com)
• Thrifty Thursday 16 (mike10613.wordpress.com)
• Thrifty Thursday 15 (mike10613.wordpress.com)
• Thrifty Thursday 14 (mike10613.wordpress.com)

Advertisement